This is my year of horrible reading. I am reading the classics of horror fiction during thecourse of 2016, and each week will write abouta significant work in the genre. You are invitedto join me in my annus horribilis. During the course of the year—if we survive—we willhave tackled zombies, serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and monsters of all denominations. Check back each week for anew title...but remember to bring along garlic, silver bullets and a protective amulet. T.G.

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You can find young sociopaths everywhere in the world. But for the youngsociopath as highbrow literary character, you must defer to Britain. No onedoes it better. The sun has set on the British Empire, but even in post-colonialtimes United Kingdom sets the standard for royal weddings, afternoon tea,and psychotic teen protagonists.

I give credit to William Golding for showinghow it's done with Lord of the Flies (1954), abook that shocked readers in its depiction ofyoung savagery. But Anthony Burgess raisedthe bar with A Clockwork Orange (1962),which presented hitherto unknown degrees offictive depravity. John Fowles tried to live up(down?) to this standard the following yearwith The Collector (1963), whose protagonistcould win a gold medal if creepiness were anOlympic sport. For a few years these worksmarked the limits of acceptable British villainy…then along came J.G. Ballard, whose TheAtrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973)made Fowles, Burgess and Golding seem tamestuff indeed.

Game over, no? Who would even try to compete with these classics of youngnihilism? Well, Mr. Iain Banks would, and at the late date of 1984—threedecades after Lord of the Flies—he delivered The Wasp Factory. The dayswhen novels would be censored were now long behind us, but Banks showedhe could shock readers even in a tolerant era. "It’s a sick, sick world when theconfidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a workof unparalleled depravity," announced one newspaper reviewer. Othersdismissed the work as "rubbish" or "a joke." No one actually burned copies ofThe Wasp Factory, but the book department at Harrod's refused to putBanks's novel on the shelf (although by some accounts, the clerk would sellcopies discreetly at the cash register).

Indeed, Banks set off a new stage in UK literary degradation, which would nowbe centered in the vicinity of Edinburgh. It was sort of like the ScottishEnlightenment all over again, but without the Enlightenment part. A shortwhile after Banks issued The Wasp Factory, fellow Scot Irvine Welsh releasedTrainspotting, which did for vomit what Proust did for the madeleine. ThenEdinburgh-born Alice Thompson did her sweet updating of the Marquis deSade with her award-winning Justine.

And you thought they just played golf and wore kilts in Scotland.

I should note that The Wasp Factory is credited to "Iain Banks"—the authoralso published books under the name "Iain M. Banks." The middle initial wasused for Banks’s science fiction books, but was removed for his mainstream,realist novels. Or so we are told. I would hesitate to describe The WaspFactory as either "mainstream" or "realistic." If this is reality, and I wereliving in it, I’d start looking for an alternate reality.

The novel begins with the teenage protagonist Frank Cauldhame learning thathis older brother Eric has escaped from the mental institution where he hasbeen incarcerated. Frank lives with his father on an otherwise unoccupiedsmall island in a sparsely-populated part of Scotland. Frank realizes that hisbrother will likely return home to the community where he is known as the"mad boy who set fire to dogs." But as the readers get to know the Cauldhamefamily better, they will realize that the oldest son has no monopoly oncraziness in this highly dysfunctional clan.

The father is a pathological liar who obsessively measures every item in hishousehold. He claims to have written a book proving that the Earth is not asphere, but a Möbius strip, and tells tall tales to his children. "For years,"Frank complains, "I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers,Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irishpeasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness." But these are mereeccentricities. The real question is what is Dad doing in his locked study, wherehe spends much of his time?

But the youngest member of thefamily, Frank, is not to be outdone."I hope you weren’t out killing anyof God’s creatures," his father saysto him accusingly at the outset ofthe novel. Frank makes no response,but thinks to himself: "Of course Iwas out killing things. How the hellam I supposed to get heads andbodies.…There just aren’t enoughnatural deaths. You can’t explainthat sort of thing to people, though."

Frank kills animals in a variety of ritualistic ways, although sometimes with20th century technological additions to the ceremony. ("First I took a twenty-centimetre electric-piping bomb out of the War Bag. I slit the buck in theanus…") For a while, the youngster killed people too, but gave it up after threeunpunished murders. "That’s my score to date," he explains. "Three. I haven’tkilled anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage Iwas going through."

Nowadays, he is more interested in his "Wasp Factory," a device made out of alarge antiquated clock face Frank has salvaged from the local dump. A hole inthe center allows wasps to enter into the device, and from there move into anyone of twelve corridors—corresponding to the 12 hours on the face—wheredifferent traps, each offering a different path to death, await the wingedinsect. Take your choice, wasp, do you prefer the Acid Pit or the Ice Chamberor the Volt Room or some other, equally unappealing option?

Banks describes this contraption with loving care, over the course of manypages. I suspect that this intense fetishizing of violence, infused at every stepwith the narrator’s (and perhaps the author’s) obsessive-compulsive complex,is what readers found so unsettling in this novel. The bloodshed itself is nogreater than one finds in many other books, but the lavish attention to itsvarieties and manifestations stands out in The Wasp Factory. We are allfamiliar with brutality, but the creepy connoisseurship of violence is lessfamiliar, and always disturbing.

The story itself is reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, even in its most specificdetails—both books represent adolescent savagery as a ritualistic process;both link these behavior patterns with isolation from role models andsocializing influences; both reference insects in their titles, and rely on them asresonant symbols; the Cauldhame home is even isolated on an island, as werethe characters in Golding’s novel. But Golding retains a clinical tonethroughout, his story presented through a third-person narrator who createsemotional and psychological distance between the readers and the unsavoryaspects of the story. Banks allows no such objectification: the unhingednarrator imposes his distorted worldview on us. We see the physical and moraluniverse as he sees it, in all his derangement and nihilism. The extreme clarityof his exposition, which at times borders on the poetic, merely adds to theclaustrophobia of the prose.

These ingredients make The Wasp Factory painful to read. Only a few pagesinto this novel, you realize that you will be spending a long time with peopleyou would not only prefer to avoid, but want to imagine don’t exist in ournormal day-to-day lives. Herein lies the horror of the novel, and it is a veryraw horror, one that no zombie or vampire tale can possess. The threedecades that have elapsed since the publication of The Wasp Factory haveintroduced us to a host of real-life characters who bear more than a passingresemblance to Frank Cauldhame—they show up at schools or movie theatersor other public settings, usually armed with something far more dangerousthan a macabre clock.

So give Banks credit for creating a distinctly contemporary style of horror.Yes, he was correct when he emphasized the realism of this novel, in contrastto his fanciful sci-fi offerings. But also acknowledge the foresight of those earlyreaders who found the story in this book repulsive. They were given a glimpseof the future—indeed, of the worst aspects of the future—and decided theydidn't like what they saw. The general public doesn't like it any betternowadays; but, sad to say, they don’t need a controversial novel to learn aboutyoung savagery run wild, merely the daily news.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His latest bookis Love Songs: The Hidden History, published by Oxford University Press.